Posted by Bohdan Oryshkevich on March 20, 2000 at 14:23:33:
I wish to comment on Mr. Panchyshyn's statements. I too lived in Quebec and he is correct that Quebec has a Francophone policy which many English people find harsh. But Quebec is engandered and the pure lineage Quebecois are losing the immigration game.
Where Mr. Panchyshyn got into trouble is that his wife is Quebecois and that she wanted to change the maternal language of her children. A Francophone herself she wanted to teach her children in English. Indigenous Quebec Anglophones maintain their rights to English. Immigrants do not. They have to learn in French. But virtually everyone in Quebec who desires to advance learns English. Quebec is de facto if not de jure a bilingual society. The francophone elit strives to go to McGill and to Harvard Business School. I know I sat in the PQ Government loge during the final day of the Olympics and they all knew how to speak English.
For instance I was born in Germany so I could not credibly put down that my mother spoke English to me when she uttered her first words to me. I think that that is legitimate policy, that is that immigrants learn French.
On the other hand how does Ukraine force indigenous people in places like Odesa, Luhansk, and Crimea to speak Ukrainian when they have not done so for generations if ever. Despite the rhetoric of many in the Diaspora, many regions of Ukraine have never had Ukrainian as a language. Are you going to forbid mothers from educating their children in the language of their choice? Will coercion realistically work.
Language should unite a people rather than divide them. Belgium is falling apart as a country because of the language question. A child molester of one language (I forget which) was protected by the police of his own language from the police of the other lest he be prosecuted outside of his own language.
I have worked with students from all regions of Ukraine. Western Ukrainian students are no more patriotic than those from the East. Patriotism is a complex phenomenon and not dependent only upon language. Serbs and Croats speak essentially the SAME language yet they committed atrocities against each other. Serbs use Cyrillic and Croats Latin letters. There may be some dialectical nuances between themselves but they are within the same language much like western and eastern, and central Ukrainian.
I think that patience, time, ingenuity, and tolerance will solve this problem. Respect is key.